Thursday, February 5, 2009

Scheduled Radio Contact with the ISS

If you happen to live in Europe, you'll have the chance to listen to the astronauts from the International Space Station as they talk to students from Städtisches Gymnasium Herzogenrath in Germany. The event is scheduled for Saturday Feb 7 and it will begin at approximately 10:36 UTC.

You will need a radio receiver capable of receiving 145.800 MHz narrow FM. The signals from the ISS are usually rather strong and a handheld scanner should be able to receive audible signals.

I don't exactly know which astronaut will be speaking but they will use the ham radio call sign OR4ISS.






The students will ask as many of the following questions as time permits:
1. To what extent do we on earth profit from your experiments on the ISS?
2. What are the aims of your present mission?
3. How much energy do you need daily and what kind of energy is it?
4. What about radiation on the ISS? Does it harm your health?
5. Have you had any problems with oncoming meteorites or space debris?
6. Which qualifications do you need to be on such a mission?
7. What were your feelings and emotions during lift off?
8. Do you lose your sense of time on the ISS?
9. How do you spend your free time on the ISS?
10. Have you got any room for your personal belongings?
11. What happens if you are ill?
12. What happens to the human body if you stay in space too long?
13. How often do you see the sunrise on the ISS per day?
14. What happens in case of an emergency, for example if the ISS is on fire?
15. Can you sleep well in a state of zero gravity?
16. How do you wash your hair?
17. How many experiments do you do a day?
18. Have you and your colleagues become friends?
19. What would you say is your most important experience on the ISS?
20. When do you think will mankind be able to leave our solar system?

ARISS is an international educational outreach program partnering the participating space agencies, NASA, Russian Space Agency, ESA, CNES, JAXA, and CSA, with the AMSAT and IARU organizations from participating countries.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Feature Recognition and Tracking

Autonomous feature recognition and tracking can be a useful navigational aid during the final phase of the lunar landing. This video shows a quick-hack prototype for recognizing and continuously tracking lines and circles at 15 frames per second (the red lines in the second part of the video).

Of course, the situation will be more difficult during lunar descent because deviations from mathematical lines and circles will occur. So there is still a lot of work to do :-)

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Update from the Team FREDNET Lunar Babies Club

In the big rush I almost forgot to bring you the latest edition of this rather occasional newsletter - shame on me...

Lunar Baby no. 2
Aaron Magnus Krieger-Kuritko, born 27 Nov 2008 20:00 GMT. Weight: 3,920kg. Proud parents: Theresia and Tobias Krieger Kuritko (yes, Tobi is the creator of Jaluro - really beats me how he has time for a job, family and to work on Jaluro).


From Team FREDNET Lunar Babies


Lunar Baby no. 3 - is already in the loop and you can try to guess the date and time of arrival. The person who comes closest will receive a free Team FREDNET mission patch. The deadline for submitting your guess (as a comment to this post) is Saturday 14 Feb 2009 23:59:59 UTC.

Friday, January 30, 2009

Picorover photos and sketches

Picorover has now its own photo album, which contains more photos and drawings than were included in the video posted few days ago.


Monday, January 26, 2009

Picorover

Okay, here is the newest entrant in our rover design competition that has caused a lot of discussions on our forum during the last few days: A moving sphere with two degrees of freedom. Enjoy!

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Two-wheel robot shoots for the Moon

It has been brought to my attention that in addition to the Ask Charlie Blog there is also an article in Control Engineering about Team FREDNET, JALURO , and the Google Lunar X PRIZE in general. You can read the article online here.

Ask Charlie: Is it possible to stabilize a 2-wheel robotic vehicle?

Yes, it's about JALURO :-)
Charlie Masi from Control Engineering blogged about our 2-wheel rover prototype and the control challenges we are faced with. While the 2-wheel setup with underslung chassis is statically stable, the pendulum-like properties make it difficult to keep the rover body stable during acceleration and deceleration. You can read the blog post, which also contains an analysis, on the Control Engineering website.

For the sake of completeness, I've included the video showing JALURO's first test drive (this was already posted back in December 2008).